Sometimes in your sleep, you may realise that you are dreaming and there may then be a moment of awareness when you have a choice either to dream on or to return to wakefulness.
Great teachers who had knowledge of another Nature often denoted our earthly life as ‘the dream state’. ‘Awaken, you who sleep…’
Two electrifying insights now confront us if we can admit them. Firstly, that there is apparently another Nature and secondly, that all these goals that we pursue and for which we work so diligently may not be real at all.
When we are fully taken up in the pursuit of these goals we keep running and running, never to reach this other Place. Running hard to stay in the same place.
Billions of people all live with their own personal idea of reality. We experience the same world so differently because each of us lives his own dream life and works hard to make it real. And because people with the same sort of dream gather together, they create a collective dream for a collective ‘reality’, knowing it must be the truth for: ‘don’t we all believe the same in our group?’
Until… until your consciousness overrules your thoughts. To keep on sleeping and dreaming in this world is to be oblivious of another Nature. To awaken in this world means an awakening in the other World at the same time. The most persistent dream of us here on earth is not to know that we dream. We populate the world as well as our own personal space with our convictions, our thought forms and our endeavours for a better future until we are completely enmeshed in these daydreams.
But the dream may suddenly end for you – just when you least expected it.
Suddenly the storyline of your book of life changes and the I-character loses the way. And funnily enough, you need to lose the way to find the Path!
One of the few certainties that we have is that life is full of uncertainties even though we still keep up the fiction that what we think about life is a reality. This conviction that what we think must necessarily be true is precisely what keeps our dream world ticking over – until we stop believing our thoughts and admit reality.
Again a shock. For in what kind of reality do I live if I become truly conscious of this eat-or-be-eaten world? What will happen if I allow the sharp actual reality to prevail over my thoughts and suppositions about it?
What will happen is that you will realise that you are dreaming, and some will hastily return to their dreams. They will make their dreams into their reality once again by switching off their consciousness and once more giving full reign to their thoughts about the reality.
The courageous ones come to a halt and allow their astonishment to take root – as well as an accompanying feeling of emptiness, futility and loneliness. If we see through the dream, this emptiness is the prerequisite to be (ful)filled in quite a different manner.
The real awakening takes place when we realise (which is something quite different than thinking) that our self is manufactured from ideas, beliefs and memories and that it is nothing to do with who we truly are inside. This ego state has no real identity in in itself but was originally meant as an instrument of the soul. But it usurped the power. In essence the ego is a mechanism, not a truly living entity, and it has a rind of resistance against the harsh actual reality. If we would fully allow it, the dream would shatter immediately..
And this ego mechanism has two arms: one to push unwelcome things away and one to grasp things. With these two it builds its own virtual world of delusion. No wonder that the great teachers taught their pupils ‘the middle way’ and imposed on them a condition of neutrality.
Maybe it is time to start practising heart-work instead of hard work.
